DylanK

Dejah, how do you steam livers with ginger?

Like, say, chicken guts guts, intestines. Pig intestines strike me as sort of aggressive, something to take serious, something to boil in a clay pot with fermented tofu and cabbage. But chicken guts are just sort of silly and improbable. They're a bit soft and a bit chewy and a bit chicken-y. The chicken guts are hanging out under the quail egg, everything covered in eye-brightening, esophagus numbing soup, set on a plastic bag-wrapped plate. Anyways, what do y'all like to cook and eat from inside chickens?

Quick translation: Beef or lamb paomo uses local Shanxi meat, salt, hua jiao, star anise, black cardamom, cassia bark, ginger, and garlic sprouts as cooking ingredients. For a good bowl of paomo, you must first have a good soup pot. Of course, the art of making soup is a business secret. Also, boiling meat for soup is an art that has many rules you must mind. First, prepare beef or lamb: give it a good, thorough rinse and soak it for about five hours, slice into big pieces about half a kilogram heavy and throw them back into the pot, get your bag of herbs and spices (the ginger, star anise, etc.) from the last time you boiled soup [like a cheesecloth bag-- but make sure it's a used one], boil on high for about four hours, put the meat in the pot [i translated this exactly but it doesn't make sense, because the meat should already be in the pot-- I just didn't put it in the first time it told me to put it in and put it in at this point instead], trade the old, used bag of herbs and spices for a new bag, stick a tight lid on your pot, get it to a boil and let it simmer for two or three hours, then change to a gentle flame and boil for about six hours. When the soup is thick and the meat is soft, take it out of the pot and put it on a cutting board. The rest is just local science and history of paomo, the four mighty schools of paomo eating, etc.

http://zhidao.baidu.com/question/2038590.html Basic, serious recipe in Chinese that I used before.

红烧肉 -- Hong shao rou in the microwave. Just like Mao used to eat it in Shaoshan.

He blanches the duck blood real quick in water. He must be a real Nanjinger because I've only seen duck blood for sale all boxed up like that when I was in Nanjing. If you liked the show with the guys cooking dan dan mian and shui zhu yu, the show is called 天天饮食. If you type that into Tudou or Youku or other Chinese language fake-Youtubes, there are lots of episodes. Lots of episodes on Tudou. It was really popular when it came out but the original host left. I think he's on the CCTV kids channel now.

香辣担担面. -- More dan dan mian. 正宗香辣担担面! Totally different from the woman above. This one is awesome for the crazy mix of science and passion here. Dude drops some serious method on the making of red oil. Frying the pan full of the two chilis ((朝天椒, 二金条辣椒) is serious, too.

Yeah, a few weeks ago Superstore had a full page of cool stuff like pomfret (great deepfried and sprinkled with cumin) and lotus root and youtiao. But Moose Jaw Superstore just didn't have it.

潮州小吃 -- Wandering Fujian raw markets, eating street food and crazy seafood banquets, mostly in Cantonese. 鸭血粉丝汤 -- Making duck blood soup. 河南拉面美眉 -- Henan girl whipping the dough. 西安小吃中地回民街 -- Hui Chinese street food in Xi'an. 鱼香肉丝 -- Cooking Yu Xiang Rou Si. etc.

Superstore has almost everything that the one Asian market downtown has but at better prices. Lotus root, yan cai, mung beans, dou ru, fen si, pi dan, huge bundles of noodles. At the Asian market we get haws candy, Giant Tree brand dou ru, dou nai. But it's a good stop, generally, with the a butcher on the other block that hooks up pork stomach, ears, tails, guts, and a ghetto Vietnamese noodle joint that's got good porridge and bowls of rice noodles with half a cow in each bowl.

This is awesome, Dejah. So much work. You've gotta take lots of pictures. The best sweet n' sour pork is made with those red bricks of shanzha (山楂) and just a bit of dried red chili. XL Beef in Moose Jaw has been sponsoring workers from China for a while now, and hiring other local Chinese that came over mostly through the skilled trade worker program. The language of the Chinese community here has shifted from Guangdonghua to Mandarin. It's cool to see cats that just flew over from Beijing a year ago rolling in tight minivans and getting mortgages on new houses. It would be great if XL Foods or the union would organize and make things smoother for newly arrived Chinese here. There's a huge ignorance of labour law and how a Canadian union and workplace work that makes me really, really worried. My wife and I have been unofficial translators for countless doctor visits, calls to gov't offices. etc. So, it's cool to hear about Maple Leaf.

It's the amazing Old Beijing Chicken Wrap from KFC.

王家沙 (Wang Jia Sha), locations all over the city:

Burger King! Papa John's! Taco Bell! California Pizza Kitchen! Fake German restaurants! Japanese fastfood egg custard! Blue cheese! Zoodles!

I never saw a dining car until one time we were taking a train from Weihai to Xuzhou and the whole thing was packed. The staff of the dining car started charging fifty bucks at the door to sit in the dining car. But we got a free carton of instant noodles.

I've eaten it crispy more often than saucy. I took saucy ziran yangrou to be a delicious anomaly.

To follow Ce'nedra's thread about da pan ji, another Sinified Central Asian dish: 孜然羊肉. I've eaten a dozen versions of it: dry and crispy, onions and no onions, peppers and no peppers, spicy and bland. So, 怎么做, guys? Where have you eaten it? This is how I made it last night, trying to recreate a version with tomato I ate outside a trainstation in Luoyang: Lamb sliced up, put in a bowl with a bit of oil, covered in cumin, then thrown into a hot pan, followed by a handful of crushed up dried chili and some sliced in half cloves of garlic, some green onion, and a chopped up tomato. Done.

I've had it at a restaurant owned by a family from Qinghai. They made it like this: green pepper + chili + garlic + onion + ziran + potato + a chicken chopped up with a big ol' knife. Tossed it all in a big pan, made it wet, cooked it until it was dried and the potatoes were cooked, the end, put it in a flimsy tinfoil pan to serve. No noodles. But they had enough laying dough around that I'm sure they could have thrown some on top, if you wanted.

Camembert in a can at your local Carrefour.

Fanta in glass bottles is everywhere on the mainland. I've never seen Greenspot before, though. Soda is glass bottles is still another reason why China is the greatest country in the world.

If it tastes yucky, don't eat it. But a professional can strip it right down to the blank skull and then crunch up the bones.

Hey, I just read a book by Ken Hom with a recipe for stirfried milk in it. The best commercially available milk in China isn't anything like you'd find in major milk-drinking countries. Not the same at all. Not very good. Most milk is that long-life stuff, lasts forever, doesn't need refrigeration. Often flavored. Usually drunk warm. Advertised and thought of as healthy and modern. If your auntie is in the hospital, you bring her a box of zao-flavored milk pouches. The cool thing about China and milk that you can get it delivered, everywhere.

烧辣椒 and, green beanz 炒肉.

The ones for sale in supermarkets here specifically say on the label: "HARD YOLKS." They're definitely a lot drier and cleaner than we bought in mainland raw markets, where they're still sold filthy and delicious. The white is less glassy and bouncy and the yolk is, as the label suggests, harder. The flavor seems a little more tame, too. For lunch today, at a restaurant advertising Sichuan dishes, we had ma la pi dan (麻辣皮蛋), something I never saw on a menu in China. The pi dan are deepfried, then chao'd with chilis and onion. It was aight. They tasted just like the deepfried boiled eggs you'd boil with bai cai or something, though, lacking that special pi dan flavor. My favorite way to eat them is probably just all diced up and laid on top of some soft, fresh, sliced up tofu. Or, maybe, in porridge.

There should be a better picture. Everything we like: dong doufu, fatty pork with lots of soft white bones to crunch up, bitter green vegetables, rich and shiny soup full of the fat of three animals.